Meet the 2014 MasterMinds: Adam Stone, performance arts

Westword has always covered the local arts scene. But ten years ago, we recognized that if the arts were really going to grow in those town, they could use some some fertilizer in the form of cold, hard cash. And so we created the MasterMind Awards, which every year gives no-strings-attached grants to five local artists and arts organizations; the 2014 class of MasterMinds, our tenth, will be introduced at Artopia tonight. This year's MasterMind Award for performance arts: Adam Stone. See also: Take ten -- meet the latest class of MasterMinds

Westword:What's your favorite thing about the Denver arts scene?

Adam Stone: There is a genuine excitement within the community here for all things new and strange.

There is so much being made here within all of the various arts, but there's no characteristic that makes any of it definably "Denver." This makes for an incredible amount of genre crossover as well as an eagerness to discover what others are creating. The lack of a definable "Denver" element in the arts scene here keeps open endless possibilities for new discovery and new work, pulling influence from everywhere, foreign and local.

How did you wind up in Denver?

My collaborations with Buntport Theater brought me back to Denver repeatedly, and while working on Wake together, we got to talking about my ideas for Screw Tooth, and they very generously gave it a home. How did you wind up doing what you do? For a long time, the problem has been that when people have asked me this type of question, I feel like they're looking for a concrete title -- director, composer, arch-bishop, court stenographer, porpoise, etc. -- and, as an outsider in everything I've pursued, my answer has necessarily been that I'm not sure exactly what it is that I do. With my company Screw Tooth, though, I think that now, a more accurate statement would be that I'm not sure what I'm going to do next. What else would you want people to know? I sing songs, sometimes while painted gold and brushing my teeth with black ink:

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword in 1977; she’s been the editor ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly CPT12 roundtable Colorado Inside Out, played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City, once interviewed President Bill Clinton while wearing flip-flops, and has been honored with numerous national awards for her columns and feature-writing.